Weekly Book Discussion of “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields” and “Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler’s Germany” with Dr. Josh Andy

The book discussions will be offered on the following dates and times:
Tuesday, March 9 at 4:00 pm ET
Tuesday, March 16 at 4:00 pm ET
Tuesday, March 23 at 4:00 pm ET
Then, on Tuesday, March 30 at 4:00 pm ET please join us for a discussion with the author of “Hitler’s Furies” Dr. Wendy Lower. Read more and RSVP for this discussion event HERE.

About “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields” by Dr. Wendy Lower

Dr. Lower’s stunning account of the role of German women on the World War II Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history, proving that we have ignored the reality of women’s participation in the Holocaust, including as brutal killers. The long-held picture of German women holding down the home front during the war, as loyal wives and cheerleaders for the Führer, pales in comparison to Lower’s incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the 500,000 young German women she places, for the first time, directly in the killing fields of the expanding Reich.

Hitler’s Furies builds a fascinating and convincing picture of a morally “lost generation” of young women, born into a defeated, tumultuous post–World War I Germany, and then swept up in the nationalistic fervor of the Nazi movement—a twisted political awakening that turned to genocide. These young women—nurses, teachers, secretaries, wives, and mistresses—saw the emerging Nazi empire as a kind of “wild east” of career and matrimonial opportunity, and yet could not have imagined what they would witness and do there. Lower, drawing on twenty years of archival and field work on the Holocaust, access to post-Soviet documents, and interviews with German witnesses, presents overwhelming evidence that these women were more than “desk murderers” or comforters of murderous German men: that they went on “shopping sprees” for Jewish-owned goods and also brutalized Jews in the ghettos of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus; that they were present at killing-field picnics, not only providing refreshment but also taking their turn at the mass shooting. And Lower uncovers the stories, perhaps most horrific, of SS wives with children of their own, whose female brutality is as chilling as any in history.

Hitler’s Furies will challenge our deepest beliefs: genocide is women’s business too, and the evidence can be hidden for seventy years.

Dr. Wendy Lower

Wendy Lower is a Senior Scholar at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. She is the John K. Roth Professor of History and Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. Lower chairs the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served as Acting Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the USHMM (2016-2018).

Dr. Lower is the author of Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (2011); and co- editor (with Ray Brandon) of Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (2008). Her book, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been translated into 23 languages. Her next book, The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed, will be published in February 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Click here for a link to purchase the book
CWB educators are eligible for a stipend towards reimbursement for the purchase of this book. Contact Melissa Haviv for more information: [email protected]

About “Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler’s Germany” by James Wyllie

Nazi Wives is a fascinating look at the personal lives, psychological profiles, and marriages of the wives of officers in Hitler’s inner circle.

Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann―names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margarete, Lina, Ilse and Gerda…

These are the women behind the infamous men―complex individuals with distinctive personalities who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology. Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism these women loved and lost, raised families and quarreled with their husbands and each other, all the while jostling for position with the Fuhrer himself. Until now, they have been treated as minor characters, their significance ignored, as if they were unaware of their husbands’ murderous acts, despite the evidence that was all around them: the stolen art on their walls, the slave labor in their homes, and the produce grown in concentration camps on their tables.

James Wyllie’s Nazi Wives explores these women in detail for the first time, skillfully interweaving their stories through years of struggle, power, decline and destruction into the post-war twilight of denial and delusion.

Click here for a link to purchase the book
CWB educators are eligible for a stipend towards reimbursement for the purchase of this book. Contact Melissa Haviv for more information: [email protected]